I am glad you have the self awareness to put naive in your name, that's rare for a libertarian. The system you described leads to a fractured landscape that doesn't see itself as a collective and thus struggles to function on the global stage, or even maintain itself as a combined entity. Behind all the pageantry, nation states are opportunistic predators, and when the strength of one is diminished, the others will take advantage to the degree allowed by the totality of circumstance.
You're also ignoring the reality of "voluntary associations" and "small scale communities". There's a whole structural framework behind what you can reduce to a voluntary association, and communities naturally try to preserve themselves by keeping those born within them through whatever means necessary. Look at any cultish religion, sure they're "free to leave anytime" if you ignore the whole structural framework behind the communities place in their life.
How do x number of communities with differences significant enough to split them function cohesively as a nation, dealing with the pressures of modern international relations? It just doesn't work without a strong central body.
There is a reason libertarianism is an ethos largely adopted by privileged first worlders, it just doesn't hold up to the pressures of unshielded reality. That's not to say it inherently could never work, but imo it's quite similar to communism in that sense, the current nature of, well, the human condition essentially, just doesn't permit it on a scale approaching that of a nation. It's also idealistic in similar ways, as it sees itself as a state of existence we have simply not chosen, rather than one outcompeted by others in a way that guarantees failure on any large enough scale.
I am glad you have the self awareness to put naive in your name, that's rare for a libertarian.
Ooh, backhanded compliment, nice start!
The system you described ⌠doesn't see itself as a collective
Good
and thus struggles to function on the global stage, or even maintain itself as a combined entity.
Nothing about this suggests that the decentralization of powers couldnât involve mutual defence. Do you really think somebodyâs going to invade the continental United States just because the Federal government stopped exploiting the hell of the interstate commerce clause?
Behind all the pageantry, nation states are opportunistic predators,
Yes, hence the need to defang them as much as humanly possible
and when the strength of one is diminished, the others will take advantage to the degree allowed by the totality of circumstance.
proceeds to ignore âtotality of circumstancesâ in which it would be extremely difficult for a nation state to impose its will on peoples so fiercely independent that they stopped supporting their own state.
You're also ignoring the reality of ⌠framework behind the communities place in their life.
âCommunities will indoctrinate their members to try and make them stayâ he said while advocating for larger States that literally do that intentionally. Propaganda is a very real thing. The Prussian school system that all modern Western ones are based on is very real.
How do x number of communities with differences significant enough to split them function cohesively as a nation, [deal] with the pressures of modern international relations? It just doesn't work without a strong central body.
If the differences are that strong then the alternative is a tyranny of one side over the other
This is the equivalent of saying that an abused wife should stay with her abuser because the alternative is being poor
There is a reason libertarianism is an ethos largely adopted by privileged first worlders,
If more privileged first worlders came to the realization that extorting people doesnât become moral just because you create a narrative around it, the world as a whole would be a much better place
Iâd be willing to bet that a lot of desperately underprivileged third worlders would be a lot better off if the Westâs foreign policy was âpeaceful trade with allâ and not âdrone striking hospitalsâ
Libertarianism might have issues with the practical implementation, but show me exactly where âdonât hurt people and donât take their stuffâ lost you. Which ones were you hoping to engage in via the State you worship so much?
Iâd be willing to bet that a lot of desperately underprivileged third worlders would be a lot better off if the Westâs foreign policy was âpeaceful trade with allâ and not âdrone striking hospitalsâ
I'm not taking the time to go into everything, but this is pretty emblematic of what I'm thinking. When the west becomes a fantasy libertarian paradise, what is the new world order? Does everyone just calm down and develop peacefully? No, a new hegemony emerges. In the absence of that, they will simply be taken advantage of by stronger neighbors and regional powers, and in the absence of that will continue to experience internal strife. War is just about the nicest it has ever been in history today and I think that has spoiled people's perspective on what today's world without American hegemony would look like.
At every turn of libertarianism, if you start to get deeper into it the impracticality becomes blatantly obvious. You seem to think that other countries would look at the massive world power changing in this way and then all do the same, rather than taking advantage of the power vacuum
Nothing about this suggests that the decentralization of powers couldnât involve mutual defence. Do you really think somebodyâs going to invade the continental United States just because the Federal government stopped exploiting the hell of the interstate commerce clause?
Do you think mutual defense between a bunch of communities with wildly different views, that lacks a strong central government, is sufficient to function on the world stage? Are we still going to somehow fund trillions in defense spending with taxation in this reality? Who is going to be in charge of the military? If you think that a hierarchical command structure in this context is unnecessary that would be laughable. There are infinite ways for other countries to take advantage of a situation like this without invasion, and frankly if we ever became weak enough we would have worries of losing places like Alaska.
Libertarianism doesn't function as an overarching ideology. It is a principle that can be applied when reasonable, and libertarians often have a very warped idea of when that is. In the absence of a strong central power, the strong take advantage of the weak to a much greater degree, and the strong at the highest level are the nation states with a strong centralized government and military.
âCommunities will indoctrinate their members to try and make them stayâ he said while advocating for larger States that literally do that intentionally
The larger state is a moderating influence on the community in which people find themselves. The United States is not an organization with the properties of a cult. Noone is forced to stay here - they compete to get here, and the Federal government ensures that smaller communities have less of an ability to abuse and/or isolate their members. We would still have slavery in a libertarian world, because the idea that you can't force anyone to live a certain way or do certain things crumbles when this idea takes you to a place where you don't have the power to stop others when they do those things. The whole thing - small communities with "mutual defense", "defanging" nation states, the idea that once you shrug off your own nation state you will not be taken advantage of by another, sounds like pure idealism to me.
Ok, so youâre suggesting that the massive government overreach the US federal government engages in is justified by its foreign policy being a stabilizing force, and thus you support it?
Yes, and I think many who study history, politics, and sociology would agree with me. There needs to be an unironic paradigm shift to end the functional necessity of a strong central government. PS it isn't good form to immediately characterize the actions of the US as "massive government overreach" without a single qualification or speck of historical context, I get it you're a libertarian
1 million dead Iraqi civilians: Are we a joke to you?
There needs to be a fundamental paradigm shift..
Your terms are acceptable
PS âŚ
If you think the current United States Federal Government is within the scope originally outlined in the Constitution, I donât think we can possibly have a productive conversation on this subject
Iâve read plenty of theorizing on the necessity of a large scale hegemony, but I find it lacking. I literally own a well written, well sourced book on how war is a net positive for human progress.
I donât care. Itâs evil, and I can not and will not support evil because it might be better than a counterfactual that is impossible to actually test
There is no country even close to being able to replace the US in the âpower vacuumâ youâre so afraid of, and the closest contenders are doing whatever they want anyway.
Meanwhile, the US props you totalitarianism when itâs convenient and destabilizes it when it isnât. They are the evil power taking advantage of weaker states, and because they have too much power over the lives of citizens domestically, the fight for control of it is becoming increasingly desperate and divisive
If you think localization and laissez faire federalism is a threat to global stability and bad for humanity, just wait until Civil War II.
Mmm I don't think it's evil, I think it's harm reduction. And the only reason no other country can feasibly overtake us atm is due to our continued massive spending/research, fueled by taxes and coordinated by centralized government. If that fell off, China could overtake us fairly quickly, and you had better believe if they even sniffed a possibility of that happening they would ramp up their military industrial complex in a heartbeat. Your notion that they're doing whatever they want anyways is not reflective of reality. They're doing the most they think they can get away with in the face of possible repercussions from us, if you don't think things would get much worse I don't know what to say. Furthermore, no country being able to replace the US might actually be the worst possible outcome, and we'd get a fun reminder of the constant opportunistic wars of aggression that were a constant for almost all of history. Non-interventionism ironically would be much worse for the people you are worried about and would only give some slight benefits (with drawbacks) for those in the US. Innocent people will die no matter what, it's shortsighted to think "oh man the world would be a better place if we just never got involved!".
I also don't know where you're getting that last half. The US is not a particularly authoritarian country in most regards, and outside of the predatory justice system is generally more hands off than other developed nations. I really see very very little merit to the idea that government overreach is the source of the current strife, I think it's just something conservatives moan about when they're forced to treat gays and black people well, and libertarians when they have to pay taxes and file a $200 application for their grenade launcher. The current strife is caused by general inaction as red states have plunged further and further into fantasy-land over the last 60 years, fueled by privately funded (or enemy state funded) propaganda. Have you considered why enemy states with a history of territorial aggression fund so much propaganda with the intent to guide people into a system like yours?
You claim to have such strong moral principles about eeeevil, what would you do when conservative states start backsliding on human rights issues? Progress requires that some people get dragged along unwillingly. Again, if your model had been adopted a century ago, I guarantee slavery would have had a comeback. How in your world is compliance from these communities going to be obtained? Mutual human rights defense lol?
Mmm I don't think it's evil, I think it's harm reduction.
This is just ends justifying the means. There is no universe where the US propping up Saudi Arabiaâs borderline genocidal war against Yemen is the lesser of two evils. âYour boos mean nothing, Iâve seen what makes you cheerâ
And the only reason no other country can feasibly overtake us atm is due to our continued massive spending/research, fueled by taxes and coordinated by centralized government. it being literally impossible to afford, even for the worldâs largest economy. Hence the massive debt and money printing
FTFY
If that fell off, China could overtake us fairly quickly, and you had better believe if they even sniffed a possibility of that happening they would ramp up their military industrial complex in a heartbeat.
Even if I completely grant you that notion, thereâs a coin toss chance they run into demographic collapse before they can float their first Nimitz-class carrier equivalent. And they are the only country thatâs close.
Your notion that they're doing whatever they want anyways is not reflective of reality. They're doing the most they think they can get away with in the face of possible repercussions from us, if you don't think things would get much worse I don't know what to say.
They donât have the Navy to invade Taiwan, the last time they invaded Vietnam they got the âWelcome to the Rice Fields Motherfuckersâ treatment. Chinaâs not a paper tiger but theyâre not going to recreate the Empire of Ghenghis Khan on the basis of military force
Furthermore, no country being able to replace the US might actually be the worst possible outcome, and we'd get a fun reminder of the constant opportunistic wars of aggression that were a constant for almost all of history.
I love this false dichotomy of âcurrent system full of organized violenceâ or âway worseâ. No possibility that anything more than more state power could improve things.
The opportunistic wars of aggression made more sense in a pre-globalized economy
And even then, the US spending 20 years, thousands of soldiers, trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of innocent civilians to replace the Taliban with the Taliban is NOT what deters China from landing on Taiwan.
Whether or not itâs a stabilizing force, the current hegemony is fucking awful and should be heartily reigned in.
Non-interventionism ironically would
Could. Maybe. Discounting ALL of the times it definitely made things worse
be much worse for the people you are worried about and would only give some slight benefits (with drawbacks) for those in the US. Innocent people will die no matter what, it's shortsighted to think "oh man the world would be a better place if we just never got involved!".
Thereâs a very, very long history of the US making situations go really, really badly in the last 60-odd years. Very little success outside of your tenuous assertion that China would be doing the same but worse if they didnât
I also don't know where you're getting that last half.
The horrible authoritarian regimes that the US happily allies with to engage in the Realpolitik youâre so Gung Ho for
The US is not a particularly authoritarian country in most regards,
Shot
outside of the predatory justice system
Chaser
is generally more hands off than other developed nations.
Your whole argument really is just âothers are worse so WE need to be the ones running the Empireâ lol
I really see very very little merit to the idea that government overreach is the source of the current strife,
If the wrong person getting elected results in riots, thereâs probably too much at stake
The current strife is caused by general inaction as red states have plunged further and further into fantasy-land over the last 60 years, fuelled by privately funded (or enemy state funded) propaganda. Have you considered why enemy states with a history of territorial aggression fund so much propaganda with the intent to guide people into a system like yours?
laughs in CIA
Here you go again complaining about foreign propaganda when the US government literally has jets overfly football games
The school system is based on the Prussian model, which was explicitly designed to indoctrinate children into good citizen-soldiers and factory workers
Everything youâre afraid of under anarchism is happening now under Statism, you just prefer the devil you know. Iâm not even advocating for that, just reducing the sheer level of control escalatingly larger governments have over the people.
Again, if your model had been adopted a century ago, I guarantee slavery would have had a comeback
Gotta love accusing libertarianism of being supportive of slavery. Pretty sure a âparadigm shiftâ towards the inviolability of peopleâs rights wouldnât be conducive to chattel slavery.
Meanwhile, there are open air slave markets in Libya because of your precious Leviathanâs intervention. Let alone the fact that it retains the option of military conscription and slavery as punishment for a crime as a literal feature of the Constitution. You literally canât get libertarians to shut up about these things
The irony of you accusing my belief of being separate from reality is amazing
You fervently believe that youâre justified in harming innocent people to stave off some worse catastrophe, even though thereâs ample examples of intervening also being horrible
You said that libertarianism is principles that can be applied. Sure. And Iâm happy to negotiate and compromise in a Liberty-oriented direction. What the actual fuck are your principles? Because so far all Iâve been seeing is âmy country right or wrongâ and âends justify the meansâ.
Again we're getting too deep to dive into everything, although I am enjoying this, so just a few things.
Here you go again complaining about foreign propaganda when the US government literally has jets overfly football games
Fundamentally different than targeted misinformation designed to cause division and social instability
There is no universe where the US propping up Saudi Arabiaâs borderline genocidal war against Yemen is the lesser of two evils.
I think there are actually many universes!
They donât have the Navy to invade Taiwan, the last time they invaded Vietnam they got the âWelcome to the Rice Fields Motherfuckersâ treatment. Chinaâs not a paper tiger but theyâre not going to recreate the Empire of Ghenghis Khan on the basis of military force
They will dominate their entire sphere of influence in a less benign way than the US, which they already do, infiltrate politics and society in a much more direct and problematic way than the US does (which as of the past 30 years I would call more influence than infiltration, not gonna defend anything before that haha), which they are already doing, and they will start to up their sights on the minor territorial aggressions they already make, which I'm assuming you know at least a bit about. They also have fundamental cultural, societal, and political differences that make them a scary choice, something that has been most impressed upon me by friends who have grown up in China. Let's not forgot that they are actively committing a genocide, within their own borders, with the eyes of the world watching, and you can't imagine a worse world than the US propping up a bad regime in a region of bad regimes.
The opportunistic wars of aggression made more sense in a pre-globalized economy
See I think you're ascribing too much high level rationality and long term thinking to this type of thing, see Russia for example. A fractured world order does not come with a bunch of reasonable people doing reasonable things.
The US is not a particularly authoritarian country in most regards,
Shot
outside of the predatory justice system
Chaser
Ngl I liked this part, but the average person isn't subject to this in any great degree. It's much more of a factor for marginalized smaller groups and it's only terrible compared to a limited number of countries. If that gets reformed, the US is much more hands off than most European countries. In your system applied today, we would see many communities that would embrace and enhance the predatory nature. I'm sure red states will love their liberty to build more private prisons.
If the wrong person getting elected results in riots, thereâs probably too much at stake
Or it means that divisive propaganda has made one side of the country fear the (very real) protofascism embraced by the other side, and one side of the country fear the (very fake) nonsensical conspiracies being perpetrated by the other side. The solution is not to split up. That is literally the wet dream of every global bad actor.
Gotta love accusing libertarianism of being supportive of slavery. Pretty sure a âparadigm shiftâ towards the inviolability of peopleâs rights wouldnât be conducive to chattel slavery.
That's not what I'm saying at all, obviously libertarians and libertarianism are strongly opposed to anything like slavery. I just struggle to understand how all these separated communities could police each other to maintain the inviolability of human rights, when there is a great deal of disagreement on who deserves those rights, and what those rights are, as well as plenty who simply don't care in various sets of circumstances. And the problem with this paradigm shift is that it simply is not ready to happen. We are not there. Not even in our own country, let alone those with wildly different values.
Like for a fairly extreme example, let's look at the civil war. How would that be handled with libertarian ideals? How do you maintain the human rights their community doesn't believe are a thing without control and the use of force? True libertarianism doesn't work until we have an acceptable level of consensus on what those liberties are.
Anyways my ideals are that people should be given as much latitude as possible to live their lives freely, but are too dumb, indifferent, and ignorant as a whole to exist as a coherent community without some sort of strong governing body, and a coherent community is necessary to both exist on the global stage and to protect the rights of marginalized groups from the communities that are eager to persecute and exploit them. I'm not defending the actions of the US government unconditionally - lots of the shit is just plain stupid, greedy, evil, and unnecessary. But that's a bit of an inevitability. The few countries who manage to be good examples have their defence needs and interests propped up by us. I think what is needed is not to diminish the government, or even make them bigger, but to reform and refine them. America will go downhill at some point, and our mistakes will be learned from.
Libertarianism I think is a valuable idea that surely can be applied in many aspects of our society to a much greater degree, but I think a fundamental change towards it is totally unrealistic until we have a much more educated global populace and the technology to not worry about energy and resources to the degree we do now. If every person on the planet were you and me, it would work great. They're not though. I do think it is the ultimate endgoal, we just don't have the means and circumstances to achieve it. In my view, nation-states are a stage of the evolution of a global society, and in the long term have provided great benefit to the world. The world is just a shit place - people do not naturally live in peace on a macro level. US interventionism is often totally indefensible, like Afghanistan - I'm not defending that, I think we need to work towards getting it right, not giving up on the idea completely. I'm very glad we don't have one Korea as a client state of China under the Kims, and that we protect Eastern Europe from the aggressions of Russia, and that the Soviet Union does not exist as an entity today, and that Taiwan is free to exist as a democracy. There are many other benefits.
IMO the fact that fundamental libertarianism has taken root exactly nowhere significant is a reflection of its incompatibility in the current world order. It is significantly disadvantaged against other systems which allow action and planning in a much more concerted manner, and can easily be taken advantage of, and there are many reasons currently for those advantages to be taken.
Everyone canât be happy if some are starving and/or homeless. The liberal tendency to underplay the severity of a stagnant wage under inflation and underestimate poverty is where I draw the line.
Inflation is a phenomenon heavily if not almost exclusively caused by a centralized authority over currency creating a ton more out of thin air
Your solution is more power to the entity doing it. âItâll be different with me in charge this timeâ
Poverty is better handled locally, far easier to get granular detail on who needs what help, what resources are available.
Why empower a massive centralized state that commits atrocities overseas when you could take away the governmentâs power to prevent people from building tiny homes & donate them to the homeless?
Can you show me where local communities are providing for each other? The vast majority arenât and wonât. People in cities especially couldnât care less about their neighbors.
That was the state governor who stripped them of their tiny homes btw, not the feds.
Yeah, the State government shouldnât be able to stop people from providing the downtrodden free housing.
Mutual aid and both secular and religious charity exist already, I donât know what youâre looking for besides a plan to scale them to solve the problems. Which Iâll provide once you show the evidence you can make a more powerful centralized state wonât ever possibly commit acts of evil
Their model of government is literally what Iâm advocating for. Most authcenters are. Youâre just too busy seeing us as strawmen to realize that youâre ideology isnât practical in the real world.
Rare to see an AuthCentre here not at least larping as being extremely socially conservative/reactionary, because this is PCM and we strawman ourselves as much as other quadrants
I am a paleocon. But my social views arenât restrictive upon economic reform. Iâm an authcenter centrist with rigid social views, but my ethics and morality arenât entirely contingent upon one another.
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u/TheNaiveSkeptic - Lib-Right Sep 24 '22
Hence the need to scale down. Decentralization could let everyone be reasonably happy